Now your 401k can invest in bitcoins, retirement funds, every wall street trader... this is opening floodgates.
It's still for the rich. You're going to need about a million to invest, give or take depending on where the price goes.
On the first day of trading, each Share in the initial Baskets was comprised of [0.20] Bitcoins, and each initial Basket was made up of [10,000] Bitcoins.
They're only selling them in "baskets" so the minimum purchase is 10,000
BTC.
No you are mistaken. The basket is 50,000 shares = 1,000 BTC but the purpose of the basket is merely to fund the IPO (and later allow issuance and redemption of shares). This is a filing for a PUBLIC offering
on NASDAQ. If they wanted to have a private offering for high net worth individuals, no registration would be necessary they could operated under a Reg D exemption. If approved and listed on an exchange it would be available to anyone with a brokerage account in any amount even a single share (0.2 BTC worth). Now pre-IPO access will be limited to high net worth individuals and institutional investors but honestly that is the case for just about any IPO.
It may help to look at how physical gold trusts, existing financial product which is very similar, work. For a physical gold trust, to issue new shares or redeem existing shares requires a basket of thousands of shares. This is almost never done by anyone other that institutional investors. However any retail investor can use their "normal" brokerage account and TRADE existing shares of the trust (TRADE not ISSUE or REDEEM). One could even trade a single share (although brokerage fees make that uneconomical). The ability to issue or redeem baskets of shares allows the fund to remain balanced. Based on the S-1 this is very very similar structure just replace Gold with Bitcoin.